Sommer Browning - Pain is followed by compassion is followed by laughter, and repeat.

 

Sommer Browning, Backup Singers. Birds, LLC, 2014.

With BACKUP SINGERS Browning follows up her sold out debut, Either Way I'm Celebrating, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists."
 Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element--a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I’m here! I didn’t run!"

From Friend

It was cold. Virginia winter. Throwing lit firecrackers down the hallway. Apostrophes of scorch. The Irishman below us. How I would dress for Third Street Diner. How I told you he spanked me before work. The heat didn’t work. Where did you go when I went to work? You must have gone to work, too. We worked so much. All the money we worked. What a time to fake bourgeoisie. I might have had my apron cinched around me. I might have had ones blooming from my hips. Might have drank there until the bartender told you I needed to leave. Might have left there. Might have.

 
This is the hardest part. Describing our sex and its absence. The nights we sleep alone. Nights we sleep next to each other, nights we touch, drunkenly wrestle, these same nights we go home with other people. Nights we are brothers in bed. Arm and arm, side by side in the alleys, facing each other’s jokes about cocks, death—wait, If we could show each other the worst thing in the world, something so gruesome we’d never be the same—hangings, infections, accidents, insertions—would we? What if the thing wasn’t an image? What if we had to do it to each other? There is a plane wreck, only us on the island, how long before we murder each other with our experiments?
 

Sommer, I’m dying. I get this message on my phone in line at Rite-Aid. Sommer, I’m dying, you scream in my ear at the rock show. Sommer, I’m dying, you write in closing on a postcard from San Francisco. Sommer, I’m dying, it’s my heart, Sommer I’m dying, can you feel this? Is it normal? as we stomp through the snow to get cigarettes. Jesus woke up, but who muscled the boulder away? Some prince kissed the beauty, but who wrote it all down? Let’s go to the mummy exhibition, let’s read aloud Fear and Trembling, let’s slow the flow through our carotid. Sommer, I’m dying. Present tense. Subject. Verb. The thinning blood vessel, the soft pulsating stone, retina shriveled and rattling around in the skull. I can hear it when I jump. Then don’t jump, I say.

 
How long does it take to get to a funeral? The windshield wipers crazily smearing drops across the window, out of pace with each other so one consistently runs over the other until the other careens so far to the left it falls off the windshield hooking itself onto the edge of the car the pathetic machine-sound of it straining to work to do its job right to make everything okay and then solid blur pressing against the windshield Vaseline on the lens through which we gaze at the femme fatale soft details make her immediate danger all the more clear.

We pull into the Walgreen’s parking lot to search for tools. Since my first car needed pliers to open the window, I’ve kept tools in the car. Before this, we were received at an Irish pub by Sarah and her family and friends to celebrate the death of Sarah’s mother. I doubt celebrate is the right word. I convince you to drive us back to New York so I can take another pill at the funeral in the language of death I want to say thank you.

 
Alcohol affects the frontal cortex causing those under the influence to lose their
        inhibitions.

You affects the frontal cortex causing those under the influence to lose their
        inhibitions.

You affects the frontal cortex causing those under the influence to Melissa their
        inhibitions.

You are the frontal cortex causing those under the influence to Melissa their
        inhibitions.

You are the frontal cortex am those under the influence to Melissa their inhibitions.

You are the frontal I am those under the influence to Melissa their inhibitions.

You are the frontal I am those under the influence and Melissa their inhibitions.

You are the frontal I am married under the influence and Melissa their inhibitions.

You are the frontal I am married under the influence and Melissa is inhibitions.

You are the and I am married under the influence and Melissa is inhibitions.

You are the and I am married with the influence and Melissa is inhibitions.

You are the and I am married with the influence and Melissa is dead.

You are the and I am married with a influence and Melissa is dead.

You are engaged and I am married with a influence and Melissa is dead.

You are engaged and I am married with a baby and Melissa is dead.

SAFE BETS This poem is called Safe Bets. Safe Bet. Sorry let me start over. This poem is called Safe Bets. Safe Bet. Sorry I can’t believe that, let me start over. This poem is called Safe Bets. Safe Bet. Shit, sorry. Again. This poem is called Safe Bets. Safe Bets. It is a safe bet that Slavoj Zizek is eating a donut.

I w many many clocks, the clockman said of his first day. As the butcher cuts meat, the architect hides the sun; hesitancy blooms urge. Tonight, there is a horse in the painting above your bed. Tonight, a mole on the back of your love’s hand. At day’s end, the grocer pulls shutters across the glass complicating the thief’s anonymity.

There is an enormous amount of joy that comes with the announcement of a new work by Denver, Colorado poet and illustrator Sommer Browning, and the recent AWP in Seattle saw the release of Browning’s second trade poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014). Given the amount of her quirky and hilarious comics were utilized as part of her first poetry collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], I must say that a book by Sommer Browning without comics is unexpected (and even slightly disappointing). Still, there aren’t many contemporary poets with her penchant for tight lines and terrible jokes (Montreal poet David McGimpsey is a rare exception), and the results are absolutely stunning. Constructed in four sections, the first two sections are striking for the fact that they each contain groupings of single-page, untitled prose lyrics, collected in such a way that they could be read singularly, or as a narrative of accumulation, each poem acting and reacting against the ones that sit prior. One could say that her individual poems are also built accumulatively, each phrase and line pushing and piled, allowing for the oddest connections to exist in the reader’s imaginations. The rush of her prose also makes one wonder just how these poems might be heard, most likely as striking as how they appear. 

Goodbye fast-forward, goodbye alphabetical order, so long curlicue of the g’s tail looping on and on into each o and so on, icy line prismed into meaning: Varda on the absolute voyeurism of a door or the way the last drop releases the bottle into peaceful vacancy. Cassette tape roadkilled the DOT. On and on until the bun in the oven explodes golden over the Thanksgiving table, on and on stormy celluloid, on Donner and Blitzen, ontologically beautiful portmanteau Juneteenth, this most personal ecstasy drawing a monster from mythology.

There is a joyful, lively energy to her poems, one that can’t be diminished even through poems that might appear cranky, discordant or just damned odd; instead of wading through the dark, even her poems that work through some darker subject matter or references are radiant with energy (with some poems that rush at a near-manic level of urgency), one that is utterly intoxicating and impossible not to get caught up in. As one poem opens: “I told you he spanked me before work, how weird it was, how nearly non-sexy. Where did you go when I went to work?”

How long does it take to get to a funeral? The windshield wipers crazy across the window, out of pace so one runs over the other until the other careens so far to the left it hooks itself onto the edge of the car, the pathetic machine-sound of it straining to do its job. We pull into the Walgreens’ parking lot to search for tools. Since my first car needed pliers to open the window, I’ve always kept tools in the car. The bandage over the cure. Before this, we were received at an Irish pub by Sarah and her family and friends to celebrate the death of Sarah’s mother. Is celebrate the right word? I convince you to drive us back to New York so I could take another pill at the funeral. In the language of death, I want to say thank you.

Sommer Browning is one of a small number of contemporary American poets composing tight, observational lyrics on how to live in the world, all of whom utilize subversion, distraction, discomfort comfort and use of the straight phrase, and a blending of lightness against such very heavy dark subject matter. And when I suggest a list of such poets, I would include: Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyk and Emily Kendal Frey. Browning uses terrible jokes more than most (far more subtle here than in her previous collection), but often as a distraction against more serious topics. In my mind, these are a grouping of poets who manage to say an enormous amount through allusion to far darker things; and when they do speak of such plainly, it can catch a reader off-guard, and nearly be missed.

Information

There is a reason

division is an operation.

A reason I know

the math behind the body.

It’s a girl

and the wires she needs

open her hands

before they’re fists.

The third section of Backup Singers is made up of the forty-one part sequence “Multifarious Array,” a space in which she’s able to stretch out and display her talent for composing, point by point by point, across a wide canvas. Part of what appeals about Browning’s writing (and comics) is in the way her unusual perspective and humour allows her incredible insight and observations, as “Multifarious Array” opens with: “A broken Xerox machine dominates the corner. It doesn’t reproduce mistakes, doesn’t allow gradual fade, it’s broken because it forces vividness.” The sequence even allows a perspective into Browning’s own work, existing as an extended lyric essay on the work of an unnamed poet, as Browning writes:

Her poems live between intimacy and devastation. After I read them, I marvel that within each, a feeling welled and filled me, then receded.

Conjured at a different angle, the worn memory becomes the missing piece. -Rob McLennan

Sommer Browning’s latest book of poetry has quickly risen to the top of my must-read pile. Via her twitter presence as well as the various poems/excerpts I’ve read online, Browning’s proved to be one of the funniest, most clever and honest poets rocking the indie scene right now. This is a book you’ll want to read while lounging with some liquor on a lazy Saturday afternoon. - Michael Seidlinger


BEST OF

These new pinking shears won Best of 2012 New Pinking Shears.
          When I hear walking in the shadows I think of Fleetwood Mac.

This icicle won Best of 2012 Icicle.
          When I hear moo shoo gai pan I think of Wayne’s World.

Fresh eggs won Best of 2012 Fresh Eggs.
          For god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son reminds me of The Bible.

Your movienovel won Best of 2012 Movienovel—sorry, I meant Movienovel soundtrack
          Someone hates these cans! See, there, now I’ve touched it. Looking good, Billy Ray. Feeling good, Louis reminds me of being a child.

This coffee stirrer won Best of 2012 Cylinder.
          Skype reminds me of Cindy King. Postcards remind me of Brenna. When I hear rigamarole I think of my father.

Blagojevich’s prison sentence won Best of 2012 Prison Sentence.
          This screw won Best of 2012 Sex.

Hypnotherapy reminds me of Kristin Prevallet, Beth’s play, Herzog and how I could have stayed at his house once, had a whisky in his glass, would have to keep it a secret, but I can tell everyone that I didn’t.
          This branch, this eyelid, this limp won Best of 2012 Branch, Eyelid and Limp, respectively.

Fourscore reminds me of Abraham Lincoln.
          This pulse won Best of 2012 Sign of Life.

Alison reminds me of Buckminster Fuller, and Buckminster Fuller reminds me of Alison.
          Montana won Best of 2012 Empty Place.

Kelly also reminds me of Buckminster Fuller.
          Kelly won Best of 2012 Buckminster Fuller Reminder.

Hope chests remind me of chiffarobes which remind me of Hazel Motes which reminds me that everyone is a church and I bow in you.
          Flannery O’Connor won Best of 2012 Flannery O’Connor until we renamed the award.

The thorax reminds me of misery, of the washing of hands, of the edges of puzzle pieces, of teeth filed down, thin layer of oil on all the lakes.
          Dibujos remind me of Orlando.

Avi file formats won Best of 2012 File Formats. This is actually the only winner I’m sure of.
          Casey’s other names are C!B!, Goosey Gander, Case & Queso American because if the world is infinite, perfection exists.

The square won Best of 2012 Non-Circle.
          Be the change you want to see in the world reminds me of boiling water, of ironing, of cardboard.

Have a good one won Best of 2012. Period.
          Yeah, I walk through the valley of death and I, like, fear nothing.

WE’RE CALLING

our bar Fingerbang, we say.

One atom carbon, one oxygen, the tailpipe says.

This is the day of the expanding man, you hear Donald Fagan say
and ask the Food Lion cashier, How much for the dead mums?

Finger her … like in a line-up? says the comedian, you say.
If we have a boy, we’re naming him Donald Fagan, I say.

One atom carbon, one oxygen, my mother says her father said
as he listened to the anti-zeitgeist. beeeeeeeeeep,

they make Eddie Murphy say.

Only two drops under the tongue, the homeopathic remedy says.
A spoonful of sugar, the unrelatable entity says.

How much for the dead mums? I say to remind you that I remember what you say.
-------------------, my husband says.

A man without language is an ugly, balding woman, I think I hear everyone say.

Happy minute, the bartender at The Buffet says and we agree,
the Assisted Suicide is a good name for anything.

 
I LOVE MUSIC AND I LOVE PEOPLE, BUT I HATE SHOW AND I HATE BUSINESS
—Bettye Swann
for Julia Cohen

I’m right back where I started. The piano is religious in its corner.
The ocean laps everything breaking its surface.
The rhythm dissolves the polyester over the speakers.
Is it true that digitally, anything?
And the always foolish heart, victim of also, victim of saxophone, victim of women. Good things come,
The merry-go-round, then money records, Jehovah, just you.

Won’t it make you feel bad? The pair, then one triggermoon?
Vibraphone rots true cello heavy-love.
Katydid swims in my perm.
Four-track tile heart & soul.
Backup singers;
no, really—get back.

Sommer Browning, Either Way I’m Celebrating. Birds, LLC, 2011.




Sideshow

We only shelled out a buck,
knew The Snake Man

was a sham and Electra,
someone’s mother. We were promised

The Smallest Woman in the World,
but expected some specimen in a jar.

Instead, The Smallest Woman in the World
asked for money to buy a wheelchair, said

she was from Trinidad.
We’d never heard of it.

 Denver, Colorado poet and artist Sommer Browning’s first trade collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating (Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh: Birds, LLC, 2011), subtitled “Poems & Comics,” is a charming collection of funny, odd and brilliant poems interspersed with comics that exist like poems themselves, as opposed to illustrations between poems. After years of numerous chapbooks, Browning’s first collection seems concentrated around a trio of suites, from the first thirty or so pages of single-page poems loosely constructed as a single unit to the extended lyric-prose sequences “Vale Tudo” and “To the Housesitter.” The mix is striking, and so very well packaged, from the shorter individual poems at the offset, and the mix of comics that both bookend the entire collection, and are slipped in between sections. As much as the comics write like poems, they also feel like what Terry Gilliam spent years creating as “links” between sketches during episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, those stand-alone animated sketches that took us from what came before to what followed.
The short, sharp lyrics that open the collection write small, philosophical and witty distances, moving from the lyric line to prose poem, a section of poems that cohere, in part, for the blend of styles, all of which revel in her odd humour and dark moments, interspersed with surreal light. Still, for the strength of her shorter poems, it’s in the longer sequences where Browning’s poems really shine, allowing herself the room to stretch out her meditative and oddball directions, as in the opening to the poem “Vale Tudo,” that reads:

Never believe the concierge.

MK and I drove all over hell, Long Island, to find a hotel, motel, that provided pay-per-view so we could watch the Liddel-Sobral fight. Griffin and Bonnar were fighting again, as well. Last time they fought, they both won. MK and I asked the concierge if the hotel had pay-per-view. We wrote down the name of the event, and he went to check. The lobby was the lobby of a plush planet of businessmen and servants. There was a bar. When a beer bottle scuttled across a table, a silk tie squeaked loose. The concierge came back; the news was grim. A child with a buoyant noodle walked by in her underpants; I noticed the staff using fake British accents.

As Browning herself writes, “Vale Tudo, a Portugese phrase meaning ‘anything goes,’ is a Brazilian mixed-martial arts combat fighting style. There are few rules, Fighters are unarmed and incorporated any form of martial art, such as Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, or traditional boxing techniques, to submit or knock out their opponents.” Who else could possibly imagine composing a poem-sequence blending hotels with mixed-martial arts with the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site, and do it so well? Closer to the end of the twenty-two-page sequence, the poem reads:

Historic Sites are usually a crock of shit.

The building is boring. The parking lot is boring. The wet birds are boring. The rain is boring. The vines disguised as telephone wires are boring. The cars are boring. The red fence around the place is boring. The low clouds are boring, the way the threaten rain is boring. Walt Whitman, we are sorry we missed UFC: 62.

There is just something about the longer sequence that seems entirely built for the mind of poet Summer Browning; something about the space that allows her thoughts and lines to freely, openly roam. It’s as though the shorter poems are nearly too small to contain her, as in this section from the twenty page “To the Housesitter,” that reads:

The House

is shaped like candy. And the candy inside its dribbling refrigerator is shaped like mouths. And the house. It sits on a hill shaped like a hill. It’s shaping, its flat parts peak, its inside furrows, then opens to grab you. Then, you are shaped. Now, you are then shaped, and your then shape punctures the house. Something nuclear. Something west-end and beachy. You are still at work. Like the men. - Rob McLennan


If Sommer Browning lived on Whiskey Island she would build a small, yet comfortable house out of broken furniture, tires, and ship-parts. She would keep seagulls as pets and feed them pieces of her hearts and tell them jokes. The one thing out of all the things in the universe she would bring with her to this island would be an astronaut suit. She would wear the astronaut suit and dance and the seagulls would also dance. At night you would hear a sound drifting over the water and that sound would be laughter. You would consider this laughter, and you would know there was a party, and you would get in your rowboat, and you would row, and you would sink a little bit, and you would bring Sommer Browning a toaster as a gift, and you would have so much fun.
Either Way I’m Celebrating is that much fun, and more. Part of that “more” is a potent dosage of grief and melancholy misunderstanding, but as these poems continually remind us, “It’s only a sin if no one laughs” (from “The Meat from the Dream the Heart Knows”). That Sommer Browning’s poems are sometimes disturbing and devastating makes the humor that is the glowing, optimistic spinal column of this book that much more sincere, and that much funnier. Indeed, these poems are very funny, acknowledging everything from DVR to Socrates, playing charades, floating away. For instance, in “Foaming Doberman,” Batfink, a cartoon from the 1960s that parodied the then-new Batman, parallels a crying axolotl, a bizarre-looking species of mole salamander, leading to a variety of associate emergencies, one of which is “little // girl swallows typewriter.” The poem ends with a wild attempt at resolution that is just as dangerous as it is hilarious: “Send the wood chipper ambulance. Send the / Charles Bernstein ambulance, call an ambulance.” Whether we’ll be bloody and shredded or taking a sponge bath in theory, we need help. Help with what? Lampooning, singing, careening, and having a little bit more fun than we think is safe. Wake up. This is serious, but not very, but, yes it is, kind of, well, yep. Hey, are you choking or laughing?
In “Notes About Art Pepper,” (Art Pepper was a brilliant, well-known saxophonist with a similarly well-known heroin addiction) Browning casually lifts the veil from things, and it’s going to be funny or it’s going to hurt, but, either way, it’s going to make music. The poem begins, “Every photo of the Parthenon without scaffolding is at least forty years old.” What such a fact suggests about perception, significance, and authenticity is a kind of thesis for what this book has to say about art and poetry. The poem continues:
In a notebook, I have notes about Art Pepper.

Something he said, tender harshness.

A child pulls a dandelion out of soil. A row of wind-crooked trees

becomes unbearable. Want to hear a good knock-knock joke?
Ok, you start.
Pain is followed by compassion is followed by laughter, and repeat. Sommer Browning knows this, and kindly, innovatively, helps us along.
Either Way I’m Celebrating also explores issues of spectacle, consumption, and desecration, particularly in “Vale Tudo,” a poem sequence that overlaps a failed attempt at ordering a pay-per-view boxing match, a description of the Walt Whitman Mall (an actual shopping mall in Long Island), and a botched visit to the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site. When asked in an interview in Mildred Pierce Zine what she thinks about American cultural consumption, Browning says, “I’m fucked in the head enough that these things haven’t dulled me into a glassy eyed torpor,” and that is certainly clear here. Throughout this poem episodes of humorous misunderstanding, “Walt Whitman, we are sorry we missed UFC: 62,” mix with statements of understated sorrow, “We make love. We watch more television.” At one point, lines from Leaves of Grass merge with a bank sign on the mall’s façade. Rarely has a questioning of moral and cultural values been so elegantly coded.
A child said what is the grass? Fetching
Emigrant Savings Bank it to me with
full hands How could I answer Get more
money for your money the child?... I do
not know what it is any more than he.
Laced, like all good addictive substances, with a little something extra, Sommer Browning’s comics appear throughout Either Way I’m Celebrating, and are indicative of the overall let’s-all-relax-and-have-fun-with-poetry-because-yeah-this-is-serious-but-what’s-more-serious-than-what-makes-us-laugh tone of the book. You’ll have to buy the book from Birds, LLC to have the awesome experience of seeing these simple, hugely intelligent little masterpieces in their completeness. But the awkward laughs aren’t limited to the comics or the poems. A quick glance at one of the title pages reveals an extended list of other works by Sommer Browning that includes, but is not limited to, “The Bowling with Brandon Shimoda (Greying Ghost, 2010),” “The House (Cannibal Books, 2009),” “Fifty-four drunken decisions (2008),” “Disturbed look on drugstore clerk’s face (2007),” and “Claire Preston’s black eye (1988).” If Either Way I’m Celebrating isn’t enough, track down a copy of I Wonder if Balzac Had a Good Pianist, a Flying Guillotine chapbook of Browning’s comics and one-liners.
Witty without being ironic, charming without being sentimental, funny without being cheap, Sommer Browning’s first book is an enormous, continually shifting, and generous act of pleasure. That these poems’ delight is scarred and a little wayward makes them all the more appealing. And of course, as the title suggests, this is a poet who, above all else, is optimistic, buoyant, and, in a fucked up, essential kind of way, hopeful. Indeed, “You thought the glitter was rain.” The effect is astounding.

Note: This review first appeared in Whiskey Island. - Nick Sturm